be careful what you wish for (from lit blogs)

There are certain blogs -- among them, The Reading Experience and Collected Miscellany -- that I respect but rarely agree with. They provide the type of commentary I long for: long posts on literary trends, aesthetic values, and the philosophies -- invisible or explicit, personal or cultural-- that guide the production and consumption of literature. But the degree to which I'm invested in something is also the degree to which I'm critical of it; perversely, I reserve most of my hate for instances of what I love. And, another twist: most instances of what I love I hate.

Last night, I read a post that typifies, perhaps to the point of caricature, what I'd name the worst -- and most common -- impulse in arts-related writing. You'll recognize it as very familiar to most discussions of the value of art, and what art we should value:

A few posts down I discussed a 2 Blowhards post on the question of "light entertainment." Michael was wondering if we aren't a bit too quick to write off light hearted fare as lacking higher merit while we reserve this merit for more "serious" works. My short answer was that the key is to value each for what it is, but that there is a difference.
Art in the big sense needs to rise above the here and now. There is something transcendent about art. It teaches us something about what it means to be human; it captures something bigger than the medium with which it communicates. Timelessness is certainly one category. If something can speak to people across generations and time periods then it obviously goes deeper. But something can also be art because it captures something perfectly or in a unique way. It doesn't transcend time so much as capture it and so transmits meaning to us from the past. Such are my scattered thoughts.

These thoughts aren't at all "scattered." Each idea is compatible with the next, expressing a codified liberal humanism. In high school most of us quickly learned the value of humanism: it provided our conclusion to every English essay. Its ideas feel simple but authoratative, esoteric and yet self-evident. Words like "timeless" and "human" and phrases like "universal truth" function both as an argument and that argument's support. So, while they sound earnest, they're also smug, and using them we're not unlike Humpty Dumpty using the word "glory":

'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't--till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.

Humanist keywords, by seeming so self-evident, signal similar pretension. When we use them, we take them for granted, when, like all words, their meanings shift over time, and have a history determined by events that are not at all "timeless." (For a very good analysis of humanism's many permutations and political uses, check out Tony Davies' simply titled Humanism).
Mainly, what I dislike about these words is that they fail to take into account so much recent critical theory. I'm not arguing against humanism, but simple appeals to "truth" and "timelessness" ignore how these concepts have been problematized. For words that sound so smug, they need better defenses. They need to be aware of attacks on them and that these attacks, simply by existing, imply that humanist concepts are not self-evident.

I don't think I'm being uncharitable. I recognize that the post was probably quickly written ("scattered thoughts"), but if it was, that just strengthens my case: humanist keywords feel so irrefutable, we use them without explication.

And if the last three sentences in the quoted passage seem to suggest that "timelessness" is not the only criteria for great art, and that the argument offers a nuance I'm ignoring, I'd ask how a text's ability to "capture" the past and "transmit" its meaning offers a criteria that's different from "timelessness." If the captured meaning can still be understood, it implies that the meaning of the text is timeless. Interpretation is not affected by culture, and even if "interpretation" implies that a text has variable meanings, none of them are ever lost or gained. (Almost every word meant to add something new establishes a more violent circularity: transcendence means timelessness; timelessness refers to the essentially human; the essentially human is transcendent.)

So, back to where I started. I'm interested in reading good, challenging, innovative commentary. Now that so many lit bloggers are reconsidering their aims, I think it's a good time to mention that. Ed's calling for more journalism-styled initiative ("making … phone calls … confirming facts … arranging … author interviews"); Laila's devoting more blogtime to book reviews; Sarah wants to post less often, and spend more time on each post; and Maud's veering towards "more original reviews and content." Dan, of The Reading Experience, is also thinking through the blog form's possibilities, and has been discussing them with Mark, who, in an email quoted at Dan's, wrote that "this blog thing really represents a new model, and I think we need to challenge ourselves to figure out how to use it beyond the familiar." I'm hoping that lit blogs, however, don't transition from "familiar" linkage to just-as-"familiar" commentary: reviews that sound like the reviews of any major newspaper. Yes, more literature needs to be reviewed; too much of the space once devoted to reviews has been cut. But to what degree was that influenced by the way reviewers understood and wrote about literature? Investing more time in reviews and commentary doesn't have to mean just counteracting literature's loss of exposure; it can also mean challenging reviews' conventions, experimenting, taking advantage of blogs' relative freedom. After all, there's no form of commentary, or model for a book review, that's "timeless."

Posted by nchicha at April 2, 2004 05:31 AM